The best hour of the week

Yesterday four of us went tramping off into the Hertforshire countryside. Public footpaths and bridleways and rolling green hills bleeding into silver as the sun set. Puddles. Mud.

Because Sundays are for Pubs, we ended up at my favourite in the village: leaded windows, warm, buttery light, exposed beams and local ale on tap.

We entered hesitantly because our wellies were muddy and English Wellie Etiquette is ephemeral and we didn't want to screw it up and be forever known as "those fooking foreigners who tramped mud all over our carpets". The village is too small to take such risks.

The Irish barmaid told us to take off our wellies and put them on newspapers on the hearth of the fireplace. "Ahh sure, and it's a good thing to see wellies by the fire. It's the right place for them."

Sitting by a fire, drinking ale, in a pub, in one's stocking feet is the best use of a Sunday afternoon I have found yet.

May grace and peace be with you...

... may your hearts be filled with joy.

No matter that God and I are on a hiatus. I still like benedictions. There are a lot of them swirling around at the end of December and I usually give them short shrift. They seem to be ironic, smug, cliches. All that peace and love and sanctity blaring out from speakers in frenzied shopping malls or in snowy, packed, parking lots.

I can't take their cloying happiness. Especially not this year. Escape came in too much sleep, mind numbing television (Q:how much csi can a person watch before her brains run out her ears? A: a lot), too much wine and the resultant rough mornings.

But it is January now. Everything is grey. And I can breathe more easily. So a benediction.

Personally, joy is too much to strive for. That'll take a while. But in the last three weeks there were moments of peace and more of grace. It's always grace, isn't it? And because I am not the sharpest needle in the haystack, it surprises me every time.

Laughing with le frere on the ferry deck. Wet cedar logs on a west coast beach that stained the tide pools crimson. Choosing my grandmother's diamonds, catching my earlobes sparkling in a shop window. Reeling in a fish. Walking Vancouver's downtown grid with splendid music in my ears-oh ipod, how did I ever live without you? Unexpected kindness. Being held in strong arms and resting my head on your sternum and ceasing-for five minutes-to be self sufficient.

Canadiana

The snow started Wednesday afternoon. A frere et soeur christmas shopping trip was aborted and instead we drove around in the frere's hatchback, pointing and laughing at all the people who were stuck/had driven into the ditch. Snowtires do not make one invincible, but they kick up the schadenfreude a level...

Good clean fun.

Then we came home and shoveled the driveway.



There is little that evokes home/canada/family for me as much as shoveling the driveway at night in the snow. Our street is quiet and has no street lights, so its usually the shoveler and the moon. Shovel scraping against the frozen ground and the bottom of my lungs tingling when I inadvertently inhale the wisps of my airborne shovel-full. Meditative work. Only, because it was me and le frere, we raced a little-the intricacies of sibling rivalry prohibit us from saying how much we'd missed each other so we compensate by trying to outdo the other in driveway shoveling prowess.

When it's cleared, we head inside. Flushed and with suddenly runny noses. The house is warmer, brighter, more cozy than when we started. And there are rewards...

the lead up

to home?

Thursday: Scott Polar Institute. Cafe in Cambridge in the rain. Acquiring more books-Christmas presents. Is it ok to read aforementioned christmas presents before one wraps them and hands them over? The Fox and Duck. Pints. Foot massage. Tea laced with calvados.

Friday-Escape from potentially ackward housemate situation via London. Camden. Fruitless search for cheap noodles. Posh British people at a fancy dress party. All of them named Ollie and Ellie and Georgie and Betts and Camilla. Fox stoles. Vodka and The Proletariate. The longest cab ride EVER.

Saturday-Hangover. Hungover posh brits making breakfast. Coffee in the best coffee house in central Londres. The largest independent book shop. Postsecret exhibiton. Sun in Trafalgar Square. Aimless wandering in Soho. Eating pizza outside at a cafe in December. Spending far too much money on a dress. Scottish women enabling said purchase. Roping a defenseless Swede into coming back to the farm. Wine.

Sunday-Sleeping in. Walking in the rain. Making lasagne for ravenous housemates. K's Choice for the first time in years. Finally sorting out work prioraties for January. Packing. Wine. That 70's Show. 3 Julians at one dinner table.

Monday-Putting the Swede back on the train to London. Weaving in the loose ends or just ignoring them. Cambridge for dinner. El Amin sausages and sweet potatos. Transatlantic calls and planning: haircut and dinner party on Friday, the Messiah on Saturday...

Tuesday-(tbc) Train to London. Tube to Heathrow. Mince Pies. Will my knitting needles make it on the plane? Calgary...(stay tuned...)

Learned today: Lemming Availability

"A snowy owl's preferred meal is lemmings—many lemmings. An adult may eat more than 1,600 lemmings a year, or three to five every day. Lemming availability may determine the extent of southern migration."

In which she rambles...

[this will probably not be well structured, thematic, or readable in any way. I was going to distract you, dear reader, with pictures. But the pics are not uploading for shit, and they'd be a cop-out anyways. Pictures may absolve my lack of blog content, but won't do a thing about my laziness concerning writing...]

November has slid by in a string of ever shorter gray days. My copy deadline for the magazine was Dec 1st, and most of the month was spent typing steadily toward the magical 1200 word mark. 1200 words is not that much, really, but 12oo well chosen words strung together in kicky, funny, hip sentences on topics that I have no prior interest in or understanding of, quickly turns into a strange nightmare of google searches and abuse of the MSWord thesaurus function.

But. It's all done, and I think that I did ok. It'll be posted online around Feb 1, and y'all can check it out then.

Highlights of November include ... The gala 25th anniversary party for my ngo. Chatting to the brother of one of the founders, only to figure out later that it was Yusuf Islam... formerly known as Cat Stevens. Yes. I managed to serve Cat Stevens food and wine, and chat to him about theatre and publishing in a completely normal manner-BECAUSE I HAD NO IDEA WHO HE WAS... I think it is best not to wonder how much of a blithering idiot I would have been had I clued in earlier.

Germany. Sent on my first ever 'real journalism' job, to cover a conference of young environmentalists. A whole hotel room to myself. A whole bathroom to myself. An invisible person who made my bed every day. Heavenly. The conference was good too. I met a bunch of very inspiring young people, and a bunch of journalists who taught me a lot about reporting. The conference was sponsored by a multi-national pharmaceutical company, so I got a first hand glimpse of how big, profit driven companies are tackling environmental degradation, and I've been mulling over what I think about that approach. As usual, I am sitting on the fence, but I want to think more about it over December and hopefully come to some kind of position I can defend.

Wales. 10 hours on the train=one pair of wrist warmers and finishing some leg warmers. Hiking up a 'mountain' in Snowdonia. Walking on a beach. Drinking beer and eating steak and kidney pie in a pub on the beach. James Bond. Cooking. Talking. Comfortable silence. Driving: complication-free mobility. A bit of a rest. No rain. Sun, even.

Yesterday. Nina and I discovered the best pub in the world. The Beehive. We were adopted. 3 hours. 5 pints. Sent on our way with blueberries 'To keep your strength up.' Apparently I am a dead ringer for Renee Zellweger, even though I hem my trousers with duct tape.

Back to the motherland in a week. Not exactly sure how I'll navigate the 'holiday season'. For the moment I'm wondering what to cook for dinner.

how am I?

I was in London yesterday, talking to a friend who I last saw when I was in London in June before everything fell apart. We've been in touch throughout the summer and autumn-emails, phone calls- but when someone ask you face-to-face, how you are doing and really means it... well, that doesn't exist over phone lines or the ether.

She was waiting, her question hanging in the air between us, twirling like a wind chime. And I didn't know what to say. Shrugging and saying "I have no idea," summed it up pretty well, and she's a good enough friend to understand both the weight and and ephemeralness.

The truth is that I don't really want to discuss, on a deep level, how I am doing. People who have grieved understand the fear that, if I lift the rug to see what's fermenting underneath, I will be swept away-back five months to being a zombie with no memory.

Come to think of it, I am still a zombie with no memory. Only I've kind of mastered the art of 'pulling it together' and so, like the classic little-type-A that I am, I seem to be doing fine. F.I.N.E.

A wise woman, whose words I read regularly had this to say yesterday:

As an adult I often feel like I have put my feelings away quickly, that I haven't got a right to love or hate or grieve or celebrate for as long as I feel each of those things. That my emotions are somehow not polite to have, particularly when they relate to other people, or when, upon occasion, they show as sloppy as a slip hem trailing or a run in my stocking. My adult life is littered with emotional fallout from trying to make important things small and falsely insignificant, from trying to be a grown up who gets on with it, over it, lets it go because that's what maturity does.

I don't think it is. And I want to know where and how I lost the freedom to feel whatever I feel as long and as exactly as I feel it. Why do I, why do so many of us, think that there is no point to uncomfortable emotion if the root cause is beyond our influencing?

Dirty Laundry...

...should be washed at home. (sorry mum, this might make you cry) But despite our herculean protestant efforts, the family dirty laundry is about to be washed very publicly.

An eviction is never pleasant. And when the evictor and evictee are family, no matter how estranged, a peculiar kind of horror descends upon the proceedings.

Today, after three months of warnings, negotiations and court proceedings, the bailiffs and locksmith arrive.

The awfulness of the eviction is bearable only because the alternative is worse. There is a kind of freedom in slicing the threads that attach us to each other. Though, in this case, the threads are more like fraying twine, and the slicing closer to sawing with a butter knife. And I don't know what colour this freedom is. The velvety close-to-black green of a hillside of pine trees? Gut wrenching scarlet?

I am grieving for two little boys with blonde crew-cuts and seersucker shorts, digging in the Departure Bay sand. The one who dug the frere and me Gabriola sandcastles at low tide- who is gone. And the one who is tall and gaunt and who is getting cut off today. Set adrift for perhaps the first time in his life.

How to annoy me

Invite people over for pizza and beer and when we hand over money for the pizza delivery, ask for more money to cover the bottle of wine that was drunk. Especially since we brought beer. And you offered us the wine. Bitch.

The Elm Tree has live jazz on Saturdays

(merci a Julien pour la belle photo!)

Flying

Tallis' motets for four voices are swirling through my ears and filling up my empty spaces. The music, rich and full, curls around itself. The voices take the lead and tonic in turns, as though they are flock of birds whirling and turning through the sky.

The memory of this evening's run is still coursing through my muscles and, though a totally different kind of salvation to Tallis, without it I could not sit here on an alien island and be able to relax into familiarity of music.

I've been running since I got here, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. Most of the time it is a battle. To put one foot in front of the other and continue to do so for 45 minutes at speed. I come back sweaty and irritated and still stressed out.

Tonight Julien and I set out in the darkness that is a seven o'clock October evening. We hadn't run together before and at first settling into a rhythm was tricky. At some point around the 20 minute mark everything clicked into place and we began to fly. One of us would drive the pace for a while and then, without thinking, we'd switch-feet slapping the pavement and breathing raggedly. Closer to the house we sped up in increments. An unspeaking agreement to push ourselves as far as we could.

We ran along the back lane by the creek, strides lengthening with every step. We were shadows racing the wind, oblivious to the other save the sound of our footfalls.

At some point in the middle of burning hamstrings and lungs and blurred vision, I felt the fogginess lift. Sharp focus and clarity gouged my grown-soft self.

The feeling lasted until I stopped running, doubled over, gasping. Now, three hours later, with Tallis rather than a drubbing pulse in my inner ear, I can just grasp the fluttering edge of what I was running toward.

Angus dei, qui tolis pecata mundi. Misere nobis. Dona nobis pacem. Sanctus, sanctus. Benedictus.

Yesterday Afternoon

the two best sentences

that are making me laugh and cry at the same time:

"I want you sitting next to me in class so that we can stare at the boy eye candy before one of us reminds the other that they're all probably six years younger than us, making us dirty old ladies, already, at 24. "


"Anyway if I sincerely believed in things like empathic warm thoughts fleeting over the mountains, prairies, lakes and atlantic ocean, I'd tell you I was sending some such thoughts to comfort you, or prayers I suppose is what those are, but you'll have to be satisfied just knowing that I am thinking about you for what that's worth and wishing I could act somehow as some sort of anodyne to please you or turn the corners of your mouth upward or make you feel good about who you are and how you've existed in my life."

Yet again, I am inarticulate trying to explain how a series of black letters on a white screen wring my heart. Thanks.

Fragile lately. The coping floats like the thin skin that forms on the surface when someone boils a kettle of hot chocolate and doesn't stir it. The world is too much with me, it buffets me along and, because I am too tired to resist, I am propelled forward.

Interesting things seen on a walk in the English Countryside this morning:

A rabbit hopping through a hedge.

Two pheasants.

A fox running across a field, chased by a murder of crows.

Teeny tiny transparent mushrooms. They had a long thin stalk and circular flat tops that were accordion-pleated.

Many slugs.

Some snails.

A hare, which loped toward us and then hid in a grass knoll until we were close enough for it to figure out what we were. Then it bounded off across the pasture and up over the hill.

Six llamas. Not roaming.

An old abandoned church and its overgrown graveyard.

Two thatched cottages. One called Grange Cottage, and the other called Pig's Nose. Pig's Nose has topiary rabbits hopping out of the top of its hedges.

A farmer feeding his cows.

Three gates that needed to be climbed over. Well, actually, two gates but we hopped one twice.

A scare-crow made of a mannequin dressed in a ball gown and a denim shirt.

One hardy daisy.

Quite a bit of mud.

steaming piles

The blog writing muse has been absent lately. Perhaps because I spend most of my days reading stuff and writing stuff, I am written out.

My job description at the moment is one word: writer. I send emails on a semi-regular basis to a fair amount of people, so even though I am crap at keeping in touch, I have a high gross level of correspondence. I over use the postal service sending letters and postcards. I keep a pen-and-paper journal that I write in almost every day. Periodically, I blog.

I don't consider myself a writer. If pressed, I grudgingly acknowledge that I am "a person who writes", in much the same way I used to say when I worked in restaurants that I wasn't a cook, I was a salad architect.

I am not exactly sure why I duck away from the mantle of writer.

For one thing, I don't think I am particularly brilliant at wrestling the english language into sentences and prose. I am a verbal person; mentally I am at my best when in the middle of a conversation with smart, quick, interesting people. I love the energy of good conversation at a dinner party. The idea of sitting alone in front of a cataract-inducing computer screen gives me cramps.

Including myself in the pantheon of writers seems to do them a bit of a disservice- diluting the genius, so to speak.

Also, my mother is the writer of the family. Delayed teenage rebellion dictates that I must run away from family occupations even if, secretly, I covet them.

However, since I am locked into being a writer for a year at least, I had better amputate the irritatingly self-absorbed angst and just get on with it. Practice. Writing. Bite the bullet and churn out the shitty first drafts. Torment the blog readers (do you really exist?) with aforementioned shitty first drafts and half baked ideas.

Since this particular forum has no special theme, randomness is endemic.

I am encouraged though. An email that recently landed in my inbox concluded thusly:

"I always get email-envy when I read your lines as they are so well crafted, unlike my steaming pile of email poo."

Email poo. Random self-absorption could get a lot worse.

Last Sunday

Not Boring

Last night, after a day of dealing with incompetence, Cooper, the graphic designer and one of the housemates, and I sat in his room and drank beer and talked and talked.

Evidence that the universe has a sick and twisted and tender sense of humour: Coop's father died this summer too. A consequence of a motorcycle accident.

The two of us are like the survivors of a bomb blast. The ones who stagger from the wreckage apparently unharmed and head off down the street. The ones with wide empty eyes and shaking hands.

Most of the time we function passably. Some days we crash. Other days, like yesterday, it is a slow descent into awfulness: the way a leaf skates across the breezes before gently landing on the pavement.

We are our own therapy group. We drink and talk and smoke and talk. We compare weird relative experiences at the funerals or the most insensitive things people have said to us. We ask each other if we are crazy, or try to decide if we are crazy in the same sorts of ways. Because if we are the same kind of crazy, then maybe it is normal and will pass. We decide we are assholes for being far away from our families. We decide that we would be insane if we were at home. We laugh like maniacs.

For an hour or two we gently salve our wounds and we relax.

The best part of yesterday was when we were talking about how fucking emotionally erratic we are. Apparently, one of the ways that grieving manifests itself is by shortening my temper. Also I have zero patience. (Stop laughing. I had patience before, I just chose to override it.)

"Well," said Coop, "You know, the thing about this is... It's never boring."

My editor looks like...

Jack Nicholson.

Circa: The Shining

blighty

So yes. I am in England again. Buntingford, to be specific.

So far the weather has been damp and gray.
The beer has been good.
Lots of tea has been consumed.

On the list: Fish and Chips. Punting on the Cam. Gin and Tonics or Pimms and Lemonade.

Trying to avoid: Mushy peas. Salad cream. Rude children.

I am here working for a magazine, but I don't meet my editor until Thursday, so work-wise it's been mellow. Rest-of-life-wise it's been a whirl of travelling meeting people, unpacking, pretending to be sane.

I miss Canada like hell. Still not sure if this was my best plan.

"homesick, 'cause I no longer know where home is."

Mr Norton

My dad's first motorcycle was a 1969 Norton Commando He bought it when he was 23 and before he knew how to actually ride a motorcycle. He rode it up and down the ally behind British Motorcycles in Vancouver for about a month before he knew enough to ride it home.

When my mum met my father, the Norton was his only means of transportation.

The Norton was my dad's entry point to the world of (now) vintage British motorcycles. His next purchase was a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow which drew him into the community of Vincent owners in the lower mainland. A motley crew of men-Danny the tool and die maker, Tim the maritime lawyer, John and Dale the mechanics. And my dad: Gerry the hospital administrator. They met periodically to drink beer and monkeywrench. 35 years later, they still do. The best house was Jack's. Jack had named his eldest son Vincent and kept his bike on a piece of greasy carpet in the living room of his house.

My father's affinity for motorcycles gently shaped our lives.

My mum got her bike license and her own little Honda twinstar. When we moved away from the coast, my dad reluctantly sold the Norton, but kept the Vincent, mum's Honda and his own Moto Guzzi. I was about 14 before I knew that there was another way to start a motorcycle than kickstarting it. We took family holidays on the bike. I remember being wedged into the sidecar and the fierce rush of wind past my ears. We traveled to rallies: Calgary, California, New Zealand, England.

This spring my dad bought another Norton. A 1973 Commando. It is pristine, the only concession to the march of time is its electric start. I spoke to my dad the weekend after he brought the bike home, he was giddy and excited like a ten year old boy. He had ridden it around the block a few times and was planning to insure it when he came back from the California trip in June.

The bike is in the workshop in our basement. It's a room that I can hardly bear to go into.

Last week I was downtown with my friend Rhys. It was a bad day, one of the days when I want to eat sleeping pills like candy and have trouble finding the energy to brush my teeth. We came out of the cafe, and prepared to sit at one of the sidewalk tables. Rhys glanced past my shoulder, and the words, "Hey, that's a Norton" flew out of his mouth.

I turned around disbelievingly. That Rhys could correctly identify a Norton-I failed to remember that Norton is written on the tank and that Rhys is literate-and that there was actually a Norton a few feet behind me seemed far too much of a stretch in reality.

But there it was. A 1974 Commando. A year younger than the one in our basement. Like a moth to flame, I was standing beside the bike before I realized what I was doing. A lanky guy, a few years older than me, with red hair in need of a trim and the beginnings of a beard looked at me quizzically. I hadn't noticed him. This was his motorcycle.

Awkwardly, I asked about the specs of the bike and then blurted out, "My dad has one." Flushing scarlet, I realized that I had made a tactical error: he would ask who my dad was, I would have to explain that actually he died a month ago, and if possible the conversation would get more hellishly awkward. I apologized for bothering him and sprinted the 8 meters to the cafe table.

As we drank our coffee, the Norton guy put on his jacket and helmet. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him roll the bike off its center stand and balance it for a second, gauging the weight of the machine. Grasping the handlebars, he deftly flicked out the kick starter and jumped to kick it over. Nothing. He tried again. Some faint coughs from the Norton.

I cannot count how many times I have watched the same scene with a different cast and sets. I felt my heart being squeezed in a vice grip. I would lose it if I kept watching. I would lose it if I looked away.

It started on the ninth attempt. I counted.

The Norton guy opened the throttle and gently pushed his feet away from the pavement. He pulled out into traffic, looked over his shoulder at me and gave a small wave.

I closed my eyes and felt my self explode into a thousand tiny fragments.